From Buzz to Ping

Call it a new trend or simply another outlet for emotions – one cannot ignore the Gtalk status messages these days! Every time I sign in, I cannot help noticing all the status messages put up there; almost glaring at me to place my cursor there and read it. Most of them help me understand the state of affairs at that end and almost convince me whether I want to initiate a chat! Some of them are funny to the point of arousing curiosity and so I end up ‘pinging’ to find out! I must admit though, that there are a couple of people on my list whose status messages I look forward to. Not only are they interesting, but also display something that’s new; latest; and probably helpful/useful.

I find the inbuilt status options in Gtalk confusing. Don’t you? A green button with “Available” should ideally tell you the person is free to chat now, but more often than not, people with green buttons are busier than most others on the list. And then, you have the red button with “Busy” as the message… and if you have noticed, these are the people who usually have all the time in the world to chat, voice chat, video chat and what not! Finally, comes the most confusing of them all. Orange button with “Idle”! People with this message hardly ever reply, and you thought they were sitting idle at the other end… What an irony! Only Google can throw such a googly and yet face no brickbats 😉Oh and the recent one of them all… the Invisible with a grey offline-r button. I actually like this one, brings out the mischievous self you see. Well, it also reminds me of our old companion – the Yahoo messenger! Wonder how many use it now. I miss the numerous smileys and the Audibles of Yahoo. Gtalk, obviously, looks more polished that way and is good for using messengers in office premises – less noise and mischief I guess. I remember reading in a research article that the most important reason behind Yahoo messenger losing its popularity to Google talk was its colour/appearance. According to the findings, apparently, the colour blue is more soothing to the eyes of the user than the cream-ish yellow… and so, the bluish Gtalk (and Gmail) chat windows got in more hours of usage, better acceptability and thus more popularity!

Strangely, in our world Colours have always made a lot of difference everywhere… don’t you agree?

so status messages made you to write a complete blog about it … i also did same by starting up a thread in one of the Orkut community named “Capture a status message” and overwhelmed response made the thread to complete thousand post in few weeks itself … and really its interesting to read all those status messages collected by my batchmates..